The idea for the P25 Best Practice program came about on a really sunny morning in Phoenix back in 2011. A bunch of us were talking about the previous day’s roundtable discussion about P25 Phase 2. That event had many P25 radio network operators and consultants in attendance. The common comment throughout the day was that no one had really taken the time to establish any kind of “best practice” information around how to run a Project 25 system. It seemed obvious that with the huge knowledge base we have inside Tait, with the great body of industry participants we work with, and with our commitment to serving the public safety industry, Tait were very well positioned to take up the challenge. We felt it was really our duty to act on that message coming from our customers and to use our global resources to create some of the P25 educational resources the industry was lacking.

Jump forward to early 2013 and we were gathered around a meeting room in the W hotel in New Orleans for the first P25 Best Practices roundtable. We had a great team of delegates representing networks of every size and shape, along with some very well informed industry consultants. We were ready for a solid day of drilling into the best approaches to building and running a P25 radio system. The day didn’t disappoint. We had very active discussions and came out with an excellent body of very practical advice for P25 radio system managers. Next came similar events in Washington D.C. and in Lake Tahoe, both of which built on the foundations laid in New Orleans. Post the three roundtables, we were in possession of probably the biggest collection of advice ever assembled on how to deploy and run a P25 radio system. Now came the hard part…

Several months of intense work have gone into turning all that knowledge and all those insights into four excellent guide books. Well edited and with excellent artwork. The guides are now live at www.p25bestpractice.com and also available as PDF downloads. There are two more guides in the pipeline.

It has been a huge team effort getting to this stage. Special mention needs to go to Brian Kirkham for doing a superlative job managing the three roundtable events, and Jan Noordhoff and Darek Wieczorek for moderating the events and for turning the transcripts into the draft guides. The team here has tirelessly edited the guides, designed them to a superb standard and built the P25 Best Practice website to host them. It’s been a great team effort that has produced hugely valuable educational content for the global P25 radio industry.

We have done our best to create the educational resources the market told us were lacking. Phew! Now it’s your job. We don’t know everyone out there who would benefit from reading the advice and insights of experienced P25 users. For this work to deliver the maximum benefit to our industry and our communities, we need you to share it with anyone you think might find it useful.

Also, we need you to feed back to us about these resources we have created. Is the website easy to navigate? Do the guides read well? Do you need them published in your local language? Are there big questions left unanswered? Tait is committed to continuing this valuable project. There will be more events and more great P25 resources in the future. So get in touch with us if you’re keen for this work to be as useful as it can be.